A thick, wet blanket of snow arrived on the eve of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, tying Washington in knots. Thousands of cars were abandoned by commuters. With temperatures hovering in the low twenties on Inauguration Day, army snowplows helped clear the streets. The trees along Pennsylvania Avenue glistened in icy sheaths. Mary recalled the scene as Kennedy prepared to take the oath of office: “The sky was cloudless, the sun dazzling. A sharp wind knifed across the Capitol, stiffening the fingers of us reporters who sat at trestle tables in the plaza, stomping our frozen feet.”
The official program for the inauguration featured short essays from a number of reporters, including one from Mary in which she described JFK on the campaign trail: “Poor men in West Virginia heard a man from Boston say he needed their help, and they gave it. In the alien corn of Nebraska, with a familiar chopping motion of his right hand, he explained that America can be ‘great-ah,’ and the farmers knew what he meant.”
His words echoing across the Capitol, Kennedy declared, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a cold and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today.” Mary described Kennedy at that moment as akin to “the captain on the bridge of a ship, outward bound.”
Not long after the inauguration, Mary was at the White House after hours interviewing Kennedy’s appointments secretary, Kenny O’Donnell, whose office was just outside the president’s. Mary and O’Donnell had just begun talking when a restless President Kennedy burst into the room.
Spotting Mary, he enthusiastically invited her into the Oval Office. She stammered in agreement, although she would describe the next twenty minutes as the most miserable of her life. “I was never so unhappy. I called him Mr. President every other word so he’d be sure to understand that I was not going to presume old acquaintances in any possible shape or way.” After all, not many people have their old dates become president, and she acted respectfully as if JFK, the same man she had happily given grief on innumerable occasions, had been transformed into a new person.
There was an awkward silence. Kennedy finally solicited, “How’s everything going?”
Mary was suddenly hit with what she called a “terrible impulse” to unburden her troubles on the new president. She thought about telling Kennedy that her apartment was too noisy and that she had been arguing with her landlord. Given that Mary was increasingly consumed by her unresolved relationship with Blair Clark, one suspects that she also wanted to ask Kennedy about Clark, who had been his close friend and classmate at Harvard. Clark had just been promoted to general manager at CBS News, in no small part because of his close ties to Kennedy. Although he had finally left his wife, Mary’s relationship with him had stalled.
But now she was sitting with the leader of the free world—how could she talk to him about her frustrating love life and paper-thin apartment walls? Mary was uncharacteristically dumbstruck. She started to get up at least four times, and Kennedy eyed her back down to her chair. “I was just absolutely quivering. Nothing would come,” she recalled.
The two discussed Kennedy’s young children. The president asked her what she thought of Caroline, and Mary said that she thought she was doing wonderfully. Kennedy expressed concern that his son was “not very good looking,” which was ironic, given that JFK Jr. would one day be dubbed the sexiest man in America. Mary reassured the president. “Oh, in a year, he’ll be running around. He’ll be putting on funny hats,” Mary said, remembering the Denver airport, “and you’ll be laughing at him.”
So ended Mary’s first meeting with Kennedy as sitting president.
JFK nurtured close but carefully circumscribed relationships with reporters around his age, like Mary, Ben Bradlee, Russell Baker, Hugh Sidey, and Blair Clark. All of these reporters were well educated and were attracted to Kennedy’s charm and easy intelligence. For reporters in the inner circle, their closeness with the new president was heady. Kennedy made them confidants and drinking buddies. He invited them to state dinners, and male reporters, like fraternity brothers, joined him for nude late-night swims off the back of the presidential yacht. Although Kennedy once famously said of the press, after he’d become president, “Well, I’m reading more and enjoying it less,” he liked reporters, and he once speculated that he would have been a journalist if it weren’t for politics.
Mary was taken with JFK. As John Seigenthaler, a journalist and an assistant to Robert Kennedy when he served as attorney general, observed, “If she could have painted a picture and brought it to life of the Irish Catholic President she wanted to see, that would be Jack.” He added, “There was something of the Irish mother in the way she looked at him; something of the Irish sister. She loved him, and he knew he had her.”
This was dangerous stuff for any reporter, and even more so for Mary, given her penchant for blending commentary and hard reporting.
Kennedy used his personal relationships with reporters to avert hard questions about his misbehavior. His extramarital exploits were brazen, and he knew full well that they could cost him dearly. “I was aware of a good deal of snickering and winking about Jack Kennedy’s interest in, and prowess with, women,” Mary observed. “It was understandable. He was the most charming man of his generation, and the most attractive. He had hazel eyes and hair to match, superlative cheekbones, and a smile that reduced women to pulp. But that was while he was a senator, and a bachelor, which made it of less political consequence. When he was in the White House, I heard tales, but had no way of verifying them.”
When, years after Kennedy’s death, Seymour Hersh wrote the controversial book The Dark Side of Camelot, which cataloged many of JFK’s private misdeeds, Mary confided to a friend, “I found it painful to write about President Kennedy’s private life. It was not admirable. We knew that before Sy Hersh told us.” But Mary also understood Boston and the Kennedy family. “As his father before him,” Mary commented, JFK felt “that rules were for other people.”
The bright optimism that Kennedy brought to his first term soon collided with the harsh realities of the Cold War. In April 1961, the administration botched the Bay of Pigs invasion when a group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles met with embarrassing defeat on the shores of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Shortly after the debacle, Mary spoke with Adlai Stevenson, who had been appointed by Kennedy as ambassador to the United Nations. As a frustrated Stevenson emerged from the White House, he vented to Mary, “That young man, he never says please and he never says I’m sorry.”
Although Mary only periodically covered international affairs, she described the impact of the Bay of Pigs on Kennedy. “He seemed preoccupied to the point of melancholy,” she wrote. “He constantly rearranged the papers on the lectern before him. It was as if, discouraged about the untidy world, he wanted at least to make order in his immediate vicinity.”
But Kennedy would only gain further proof of how hard it would be to bend the world to his will in late May and early June of 1961, when Mary and fifty other reporters accompanied Kennedy on his first overseas trip as president, journeying to France, Austria, and the United Kingdom.
In Paris, JFK was greeted by French president Charles de Gaulle at the airport as the Marine Band played “La Marseillaise” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “Making his way across the field, he spotted the familiar faces of the White House press corps,” Mary remembered. “He waved to us, a low surreptitious, under-handed wave which somehow conveyed his whole situation.”
The glamorous American president and equally glamorous first lady were a sensation in France. Parisian women bowed and giggled in front of photographs of JFK in shop windows. Parisians gathered in knots around Mary and other reporters just so they could register their approval of their American guest. Mary was assigned to the press pool covering Kennedy’s evening visit to the palace at Versailles. The Kennedys and the de Gaulles were joined by 150 guests in the opulent Hall of Mirrors, with its gilded statuary and vaulted ceilings, for a six-course meal. Following the dinner, de Gaulle led Kennedy through the lengthy corridors to the Royal Opera hall for a special performance by the Paris Opera Ballet.
At intermission, Mary, who had stood for the first half of the performance in the small but exquisitely proportioned theater, cast about for a new perch. She noticed that the two presidents had disappeared into a small room behind the king’s box. Taking a deep breath, Mary pushed through the mirrored door and was startled to find herself in a small chamber with Kennedy, de Gaulle, and a handful of the most privileged guests, sipping champagne. Mary had no business being there, but she realized that a sudden exit would have been as embarrassing as her uninvited entrance.
Kennedy glanced quizzically at Mary, bemused by her trespass. He approached, and they could not suppress their laughter.
“Well, it makes you think, doesn’t it?” said the president, shaking his head. “Pretty impressive.” He added, “This is a little different than Fred Waring and Lawrence Welk at the White House. We’ve got to start doing something different. I don’t know just what, but we’ve got to do something.”
Mary was surprised—and relieved—by Kennedy’s attention. “The president did seem very happy to see me, and immediately clued into a conversation. He couldn’t have been more friendly and approachable and casual and gay—the way he always was.”
Mary asked Kennedy how he was getting along with de Gaulle. Kennedy raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Have you met him?” he asked.
Mary said that she had not.
“Do you want to?”
“Yes, that would be nice.”
Kennedy, not even bothering to try his French, introduced Mary to de Gaulle.
“General, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, one of our journalists. This is Mary McGrory from the Washington Star.”
De Gaulle reacted with studied indifference, looking over Mary’s shoulder. Kennedy chatted on amiably in English. Mary was struck by the fact that in a room full of French speakers, Kennedy gravitated toward her because she was safe and familiar. Behind all of Kennedy’s manners and grace was a lasting shyness. “He preferred people to come to him,” Mary said, because it gave him a sense of control.
Things took a far more serious turn as Kennedy headed to Vienna for his first meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Many of Kennedy’s key foreign policy advisers had argued against holding a summit with the Soviets so early in the term. Khrushchev was eager to intimidate Kennedy, and the discussions between the two were grim. Khrushchev berated and bullied the president to an embarrassing degree. He was particularly bellicose about Berlin, and an exasperated Kennedy finally made clear that Soviet adventurism could push the two nations into war. Recognizing that the talks had been a disaster, Kennedy told journalist Scotty Reston after the meetings, “I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.”
Not long after the Europe trip, Mary’s relationship with Blair Clark came to a head. Irritated by Clark’s continued indecision and upset that he had not been in contact with her when they had both been in Vienna, Mary wrote to Clark demanding that they sever all ties. If they were not going to be a couple, Mary wanted to stop tormenting herself. Maintaining a casual facade was simply too painful.
Clark responded at some length in a letter. “Dearest Mary bird, I have thought, hesitated, turned this way and that and—yes—suffered over how to respond to your letter of dismissal.” Calling himself her “grand-ambivalent friend,” he ruminated on what it would have been like if they’d sat down and truly discussed their mutual feelings.
How fierce I think we would have been, how merciless—especially you, sparing me (a little), but not yourself. I think we would have laughed, though, and found it hard to be solemn. (Indeed, I’ve never seen you that way.) All you want you say, is not to see me, and that is the simplest favor to grant, in my current obsessive state when I really see no one. If I tell you there is no way we can avoid each other given all the real and accidental links, I seem to be taking you too seriously in the farewell, or not enough. I see us meeting on the red carpet to the stairs of the Waldorf’s Grand Ballroom at some Hibernian B’nai Brith dinner and being unable to carry off the estrangement, or laughing at the same thing—perhaps each other. Mary bird, it won’t work. . . . I’m asking for a retraction, for another lease on a life we’ve never lived, for more charity. I love you Mary, and you know it. It’s just that I won’t do (much of anything.) Please spare me and forgive me.
The letter perfectly encapsulated all that Mary found equally maddening and appealing about Clark: the charm, irreverence, elusiveness, and unwillingness to commit. But his letter carried the day, and Mary was not strong enough to cut off contact.
Why did Mary continue to carry a torch for him? She always had a soft spot for lost causes—perhaps because it felt very Irish. Perhaps a relationship doomed to failure was purer and more romantic. The witty and pointed letters back and forth felt like the diary of a great love affair waiting to be saved by some miracle—Mary’s own Jane Austen moment. Clark was a first-class flirt, and he offered Mary a sense of real intimacy, with the safety of distance. Because it was more a romantic than a sexual entanglement, her career wasn’t at risk. Mary had achieved a love befitting a classic novel, but in many ways it was just as remote.
She also got to know the president’s brother Bobby better during this period. Their relationship was complex. The attorney general was more confrontational, less literary, and more devout than the president. His reputation as the ill-tempered political enforcer of the Kennedy clan was well earned, and his appointment to the cabinet had been one of family loyalty over qualification.
Mary was uneasy about Bobby’s sharp edges, and she described him like a British weather report: “Cloudy, with bright intervals.” But despite some differences, Mary and Bobby forged a close bond. (As she also did with Bobby’s wife, Ethel, who was a deeply observant Catholic and a great fan of Mary’s work.)
Bobby’s former press secretary, John Seigenthaler, noted that Bobby was wary of Mary as a reporter, and the younger Kennedy also knew that in Mary’s eyes, he was always wanting in comparison with his brother. Haynes Johnson, a close friend of Bobby’s, observed: “Jack was like a Boston Brahmin or an English lord and Bobby was a parish priest—tough as nails and would fight like hell.”
Mary traveled to the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port as a guest. “Bobby tried to teach me to water ski,” she remembered. “It was one of his few failures as a coach.” As Mary confided to a fellow visitor, Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, the only way to get along with the Kennedys was to preemptively admit that you were an underachiever so that you could get enough space to sit and read a book rather than joining a touch football game.
Mary was invited to a number of the salons hosted by Bobby and Ethel at Hickory Hill, their sprawling Civil War–era white-brick home in McLean, Virginia. The gatherings became emblematic of the new administration, with artists, politicians, intellectuals, and others gathering to discuss great ideas of the day.
Mary also recalled a winter day when she emerged from the Justice Department after an interview. A black limousine pulled up next to her. It was Bobby and Ethel. Bobby rolled down the window and called out to her, “Are you coming to my party? We’re having a reception for foreign students.”
Mary replied that she had to get back to her office, and she started walking down 10th Street. A few seconds later, she heard pounding footsteps. Bobby was running after her. Reaching Mary, he leaned over, scooped her up, and threw her over his shoulder.
“You are coming to my party,” said Bobby, roaring with laughter. Racing back down the street, he carried Mary up the stairs to the entrance of the Justice Department.
Not long after her trip to Europe with JFK, Mary traveled with Bobby, Ethel, and a small congressional delegation to Rome for a private audience with Pope John XXIII at Castel Gandolfo. The pope, smiling, entered the high-ceilinged chamber wearing red shoes and a white cassock. The Americans dropped to their knees. The pope easily shifted from a gesture of benediction to motioning his visitors to rise. He invited all of the Catholics to receive his personal blessing while pointing out that “it wouldn’t hurt” the non-Catholics to do so as well. Mary was particularly enthusiastic about Pope John’s reforms, later codified in Vatican II, which, among other things, allowed Catholic masses to be held in local languages rather than Latin. She saw him as a much-needed breath of fresh air in the Church.
Mary had come far: she was a syndicated columnist, President Kennedy had personally introduced her to Charles de Gaulle, her niece and nephew had met JFK in the Oval Office, and now she was being invited to a private audience with the pope at the Vatican. Her life was almost inconceivable to her friends and family back in Roslindale.
• • •
In late July 1961, Kennedy announced from Washington that he was dramatically expanding the U.S. military in response to Nikita Khrushchev’s threats. Mary described the president as he addressed the nation on the Berlin crisis: “Inside his stuffy, crowded office, the president was tense. Outside it was a perfect summer night, an almost full moon riding high, the trees black against the sky. The president looked hot and preoccupied.” It struck Mary that Kennedy was trying to reason with the American public rather than rouse them. “We intend to have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear action,” he said.
As the Soviets attempted to isolate West Berlin by erecting the Berlin Wall, in August 1961, Kennedy called for the active-duty military to be expanded by more than 210,000 men. Fears of a war between the two superpowers intensified. The wall’s completion, which stopped the rush of immigration into West Berlin and trapped East Germans behind the Iron Curtain, ushered in an uneasy standoff that would endure for decades. The Cold War had its most physical embodiment: an ugly concrete scar running through the heart of Germany.
With Kennedy approaching the end of his first year in office and his tenure having been marked by the harsh realities of the Cold War, the editors at the Star assigned Mary an “anniversary” story in January 1962. She requested an interview with JFK through the White House press office at a time when numerous other reporters were working on similar pieces. Mary stewed when no response was forthcoming.
She called up Kenny O’Donnell to complain, touching his most sensitive nerve: clan loyalty.
“Kenny,” Mary sighed, “I did not see Roscoe Drummond”—the head of the Christian Science Monitor’s Washington bureau, who had been granted a presidential interview—“in Wisconsin, and I did not ride any buses with Roscoe Drummond in West Virginia. I was there. Have you forgotten all your old friends?”
Mary was miffed, and O’Donnell knew it.
“Mary, Mary,” he said, trying to calm her, “what do you want?”
“I want to see the president,” Mary said.
“Do you want to come in this afternoon?”
“No, tomorrow morning will be all right.”
So the next morning at 10:30, a grinning Kenny O’Donnell ushered Mary into the Oval Office with great flourish.
President Kennedy strode forward, rubbing his hands together. He gently placed a hand on Mary’s arm. “There she is. I was wondering where you had been. I was just saying to Kenny the other day, ‘We never see Mary anymore.’”
Kennedy wore a gray suit, and he looked tired, but not depressed. He noted in even tones that his first year had brought its share of disappointments. Mary was struck by his lack of swagger. She simply could not stay angry with him.
As the two drank their coffee, Kennedy said, “I see you’re writing about Goldwater.”
Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative firebrand from Arizona, was widely expected to be Kennedy’s Republican challenger in 1964, although the outspoken Goldwater had yet to formally announce his plans.
Mary nodded.
“I didn’t read it,” declared Kennedy. It came across as more of a rebuke than intended.
“Oh, you didn’t,” Mary responded, taken aback.
“No,” Kennedy said. “Any story that starts out that a man would rather be right than president, I never finish.” For the intensely pragmatic Kennedy, Goldwater’s emphasis on ideology over electability was baffling.
“Except that in his case,” retorted Mary, “don’t you see that it’s literally true?”
Kennedy pondered Goldwater’s stance almost as a curiosity. “Oh, yes. I never thought of that.”
Mary described the session with Kennedy in her column the next day. She omitted the exchange about Goldwater and wrote that Kennedy “stood on the eve of his first anniversary in power, attempting as always to convince with facts and figures rather than a show of feeling, making no great claims, aware of his problems, conscious of his responsibilities and, on Monday anyway, hopeful.”
As the interview drew to a close, Kennedy suddenly proffered Mary an invitation to a White House congressional dinner that was scheduled a few days later. “Why don’t you come? Why don’t you come?” Kennedy gave a halfhearted explanation for why she hadn’t gotten the peace offering of an invitation sooner.
At the dinner, JFK and Jackie made a grand entrance as the band played “Hail to the Chief.” Mary was pleasantly surprised when Congressman Charles Halleck, the Republican House minority leader, called down the table during the meal to tell Mary how much he enjoyed her columns.
As the evening wound down, Mary and Kennedy chatted at some length in the hall. Both were enjoying themselves. She shared her surprise that Congressman Halleck was a regular reader.
Kennedy smiled. “He reads those stories, does he?” said the president. Then, referring back to their conversation in the Oval Office, he added, “And when he reads that you’ve said that a man would rather be right than president, he reads all the way through, does he?” Mary smiled.
• • •
The 1962 California governor’s race gave Mary a chance to again cover the politician she loved to loathe: Richard Nixon. (She had once written to a friend about Nixon, “If he were a horse, I should not buy him.”) Nixon hoped that a win in California would help rehabilitate his image and provide a springboard to the presidency. He regularly accused Governor Pat Brown of being soft on subversives, casting himself as the country’s fiercest anti-Communist. “Just why Californians should be so obsessed with the subject of domestic communism is puzzling,” pondered Mary. “Everyone here, including Richard M. Nixon, who brought it up, insists that communism is not a major issue in Mr. Nixon’s campaign against Governor Edmund (Pat) Brown. It is merely the one that sets audiences on fire.”
Mary knew the race would be tight, and as the contest neared its climax, the Cuban missile crisis erupted, in October 1962. With the United States and the Soviet Union on the brink of nuclear confrontation, the world held its collective breath. Although fears of a nuclear war were not new, the entire situation was enormously unsettling. It was not long before Popular Mechanics was selling do-it-yourself home fallout-shelter kits.
Mary was at the Beverly Hilton hotel with the Nixon campaign on Election Night. At one in the morning, Governor Brown, with a lead of 100,000 votes, claimed victory. Mary described the scene at the Nixon camp. “At 1:50, the atmosphere on the seventh floor was snappish. An aide stood on the barricades and threatened to call the fire marshal if the television cameras did not go back. A heated exchange followed and the cameras retreated a foot. Post-mortems were quietly being conducted between lesser staff aides and reporters.” Campaign aide Caspar Weinberger, then the Republican state chairman, went down to the ballroom to tell bedraggled partisans that there would be no statement from Nixon.
The next morning when Herb Klein, Nixon’s press secretary, told Nixon that the press was waiting for a traditional concession speech, he replied simply, “Screw them.” Klein went down to address the press in the Hilton’s Cadoro Room, announcing that Nixon had conceded but would not appear. Klein was surprised as everyone else when Nixon, against his better judgment, decided to come down from his suite and take the podium. He was exhausted, unshaven, and surrounded by red-eyed assistants. The results made for one of Mary’s most famous columns. It began, “For Richard M. Nixon, it was exit snarling. He bowed off the political stage, turning on friends and enemies alike, protesting all the while he had ‘no hard feelings against anybody.’”
Mary could not have imagined better material, and she took Nixon apart in magisterial fashion.
Mr. Nixon carried on for 17 minutes in a finale of intemperance and incoherence unmatched in American political annals. He pulled the havoc down around his ears, while his staff looked on aghast. His principal target was the press. But he was like a kamikaze pilot who keeps apologizing for the attack. Every time he scorched the Fourth Estate, his voice curling with rage and scorn, he insisted that he had no complaint. Throughout, he was obviously having a furious inner argument with himself. The schooled politician who came within an ace of the White House kept telling him not to do it. But the sore loser told him to keep going. Three times he said, “one last thing.” But the rancor that had propelled him to confront his persecutors, whom he said at one point he has always respected, would not let him quit.
Nixon then uttered some of his most famous words: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference, and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you.”
Mary’s column concluded, “No questions had been asked except by Mr. Nixon of himself. None actually remained, the former vice president having disposed of everything, including possibly his reputation, in his epic tirade.”
Her column provoked intense reactions. One Star reader telegrammed the editors: “McGrory’s column concerning Vice President Richard M. Nixon meanest, lowest, dirtiest diatribe yet written, your rag has reached a new low. Cancel my subscription and remove your yellow box from my property no later than today.” Another wrote, “I know it’s typical of the Irish to kick a man when he’s down, but even the Irish are human beings who must have somewhere in their hearts a faint shred of compassion.”
The vitriol was such that the Washington Post’s White House correspondent, Edward Folliard, felt compelled to write to the Star in Mary’s defense: “I have been a reader of the Evening Star since I was in short pants. Never in all that time—and it has been an awfully long time—have I seen such meanness of spirit and such uncontrolled and unjustified rage as was poured into your letter to the editor department by those who wrote in to denounce Mary McGrory’s story.”
The response from other quarters was kinder. Ben Bradlee and humorist Art Buchwald cabled Mary: “Now that you don’t have Nixon to kick around, you’ll never write a better story.” Mary also received a gracious note from W. P. Hobby of the Houston Post, a juror for the Pulitzer Prize that year: “Four of us read 78 entries in two days—some of them pretty grim. There was no question as to which of the 78 entries made the most enjoyable reading. . . . The Pulitzer group on national affairs seemed to be afflicted with the idea that everything has to be cosmic, so your entry didn’t get recommended for the award, but it did make the day considerably brighter.” Mary’s style remained too unconventional for the Pulitzer’s arbiters of taste.
When Eleanor Roosevelt passed away, on November 7, 1962, Mary flew to the funeral on Air Force One with JFK and a number of other senior officials and reporters. The president came to the front of the plane and saw Mary. His mood was light. The Cuban missile crisis had been successfully resolved through adroit backroom diplomacy that left Kennedy looking like he had stared down the Soviets.
“Say Mary, that was a nice story you wrote about Nixon.” Grinning, he added, “I must remember to smile when I get defeated.”
Kennedy sat down next to Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had earlier served as California’s governor and who also disliked Nixon. Recently appointed justice Arthur Goldberg appeared, and Kennedy asked Warren, “Is Arthur being any help to you up there, Chief?”
Chief Justice Warren chuckled.
The president and Warren then huddled over a series of press clippings from Nixon’s defeat in California. “It would have been hard to say, watching their faces,” Mary commented, “who had enjoyed the downfall more, the Chief Justice or the President of the United States. They had their heads together over the clippings and were laughing like schoolboys.”
Perhaps Mary’s only regret from her “exit snarling” column was her absolute conviction that Nixon was finished as a politician, a view that she later called a huge mistake.
• • •
Despite her often grueling schedule, Mary remained committed to helping out with the orphans from St. Ann’s. Instead of using the many demands on her time as an excuse to bow out of volunteering, Mary used her success to pull in high-profile supporters to her cause. Mary enlisted the Kennedys to help out at St. Ann’s, and in 1961 she arranged for the kids’ annual Christmas party to be held at the White House. Enthusiastic three- and four-year-olds ate ice cream and admired the largest Christmas tree they had ever seen. Carefully wrapped presents greeted the children, and a number of the Kennedy children joined the almost sixty kids from St. Ann’s in the East Room. Sister Frances led the kids in “Joy to the World,” and Bobby Kennedy sternly directed his own kids to wait their turn on Santa’s lap. At the end of the party, a White House butler dutifully held a balloon for one of the orphans as he wrestled on his coat.
The event made a lasting impression on Bobby. He decreed that Mary must bring the children to swim at his house. Every Wednesday afternoon during the summer, Justice Department vans picked up Mary and the kids and trundled them out to Hickory Hill. Bobby attended a number of times, happily embracing soggy kids as they emerged from the pool, soaking his white dress shirt.
In 1962, Bobby again joined in the orphans’ annual Christmas party, held at the home of one of Mary’s coworkers. He had been asked to attend by one of the orphans, Rita, at a pool party. Although the festivities got off to a shaky start when one of the kids saw Santa emerging from a taxi, Saint Nick, thinking fast, explained that a minor sled accident had forced him into alternative transport.
The attorney general sat happily with the small, dark-eyed Rita in his lap. Mary had gotten Rita and several other girls small patent leather purses. They beamed. Unfortunately, as the kids dug into their ice cream and cake, Rita misplaced her bag. She accused one of the other girls of stealing it. As Rita fought back tears, Mary explained that some of the bags looked alike.
Bobby took charge. Mary laughingly wondered if he would bring in the police, or perhaps the FBI. “I’ll handle the investigation myself,” Bobby insisted. After finding Rita’s bag under the coffee table, he held it aloft and exclaimed, “I broke the case. I broke the case.”
“It was total immersion,” Mary observed of Bobby’s interactions with the kids. “Kennedy needed children as much as they needed him.”
The year 1963 began sleepily. JFK had survived and thrived after his early foreign policy missteps. His successful handling of the Cuban missile crisis was widely viewed as a triumph. At the Star, Newby Noyes was promoted to executive editor, even as circulation slipped behind the Washington Post’s. Mary’s mother and her aunt Kate moved out of their house on Kittredge Street in Roslindale, taking up residence in a nearby apartment. Mary continued her regular pilgrimages home and to Aunt Kate’s place in Antrim, New Hampshire. As a girl, she had regularly traveled up to Antrim, where her Aunt Kate owned a small cottage on Gregg Lake. The entire family soon fell in love with Antrim and the lake—none more so than Mary. The log cottage, down a rough dirt road lined by a lush carpet of ferns, had a large fieldstone fireplace and white birch railings. Mary swam in the bracing lake water and took day hikes up nearby Holt Hill. Antrim was one of a handful of places that had a special hold on Mary.
In the spring of 1963, with Pope John XXIII lying critically ill, the Star’s editors dispatched Mary to Rome, and she was in St. Peter’s Square when the fateful news arrived that the pope had died. “Death came to Pope John XXIII at the twilight of a glorious spring day,” she wrote. “The last golden light of Rome filled the sky and a three-quarter moon was rising over the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square when word came that he had finally begun that journey for which he had so often said he was ready.”
Back at the White House, members of the cabinet debated whether Kennedy should cancel a planned trip to Italy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then Kennedy’s assistant secretary of labor, wrote to Mary in Rome in late June 1963: “It is just as we feared—you won’t ever come back to us. I was about to write you last week to say how absolutely startlingly marvelous everything you have written has been.” Mary and Moynihan had become good friends, and she had deep affection for the cerebral New Yorker. In his letter, Moynihan described the debate at the White House regarding Kennedy’s trip. When someone suggested that Kennedy should cancel the visit, the president declared, “Out of the question, I have to go to Rome in order to bring Mary back.”
Returning from Rome, Mary covered JFK’s Oval Office address on the night of July 26, 1963, when he announced his support for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Kennedy stopped to chat with Mary after the speech and asked how she was doing.
“I’m happy,” said Mary. “I think this was a great moment. I think I’m even happier than you are.”
Kennedy said, “Well, I’m happy.”
Mary gently pushed back, “Well, you didn’t sound that way.”
Jabbing his left arm forward, Kennedy changed the subject. “What I want to know is why didn’t the Star consider your credentials good enough to come to Ireland with us?” He was referring to a trip to Ireland the month before.
“Oh, I think it was something to do with immigration quotas,” joked Mary, and the two laughed. But Mary also saw a message in Kennedy’s inquiry. “It was interesting that he didn’t want to waste any time discussing nuclear policy, when he did want to address a very specific inquiry indicating he knew who was where at all times.”
But if international issues dominated the early part of Kennedy’s term, domestic problems were never far beneath the surface, and the growing civil rights struggle was increasingly becoming a focus of Mary’s writing. She pushed for a chance to do more reporting from the South, but her editors were concerned for her safety.
Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech before a massive crowd in Washington on August 28, 1963. Mary attended the speech with Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News and Kennedy pollster Lou Harris. She met Harris and Lisagor on the Capitol steps. The days before the speech had been incredibly tense, and Washington was on high alert, expecting violence. Large numbers of police and national guardsmen were positioned all over the city, and most Washingtonians stayed home from their jobs, fearing clashes in the streets. Mary’s assessment of the threat was quite different; she brought a picnic basket of hard-boiled eggs, which she, Lisagor, and Harris ate as they stood at the Lincoln Memorial. They were just twenty feet away from King as he delivered his speech.
On September 15, 1963, in a savage rejoinder to Dr. King, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Church, in Birmingham, Alabama. The senseless attack wounded more than twenty and killed four young girls attending Sunday services. The attack on the church was so galling, and the March on Washington so orderly and respectful, that the national tide began to make a decisive shift in favor of civil rights.
Mary attended the memorial service for the children, in a crowded black church in Birmingham, and her series of columns from Alabama brimmed with outrage. Indeed, it is hard to imagine anything more appalling to Mary than an attack on innocent children in a church. “Dynamite has become a principal means of political expression in this strange, sick city,” she wrote.
Mary ardently supported the role of faith leaders in promoting civil rights, and she delighted in seeing student protestors and nuns standing side by side under a common banner. On a plane ride back from Selma, Alabama, Mary insisted on helping a group of interfaith leaders write their public statement. It was an admirable sentiment, but the moment also underscored Mary’s increasing willingness to write her own rules as a reporter.
Mary did not consider herself bound by normal standards of journalistic impartiality. “It is not my responsibility,” she argued. “If I wanted to be fair and objective, I wouldn’t be writing.” Mary thought of herself not as a columnist but as a reporter who had been given license to deliver her opinion. If the Kennedys, as Mary argued, saw themselves as above the rules of society, Mary saw herself as outside the usual standards of journalism. As one letter to the Star’s editor during the 1960s complained, “This is not an account of events but an opinion, a loaded opinion—skillful, subtly, and dangerously loaded.”
Haynes Johnson observed that Mary had “no qualms at all” crossing the lines that other reporters were reluctant to breach. “Her role was to influence events and to influence the world through her writings. If she could do it by personal importuning and pressure, she would do that.”
By September and October of 1963, Mary was happily previewing the likely Republican presidential contenders. Although both Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney hoped to win the nomination, Rockefeller’s divorce and remarriage had badly damaged him in the eyes of Republican voters, and Romney simply never caught fire. Former senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, also hinted that he might run. But Barry Goldwater was the darling of the right, and his impolitic rhetoric thrilled conservatives. Kennedy relished the idea of running against Goldwater. Mary wrote that when Goldwater’s name came up in press conferences, the president looked “like a child who wants to save his candy so he can savor it better later.”
In mid-November, Mary received an invitation to a White House lunch scheduled for December 6, 1963. She noted with satisfaction that the invitation had arrived well in advance.
On November 14, Mary covered the president’s press conference at the State Department Auditorium. At one point, a reporter invited Kennedy to criticize Congress for its failure to pass several key spending bills. But as Mary observed, “This most rational man refused. It was not his style. Instead, he quoted from the poet Arthur Hugh Clough: ‘But westward, look, the land is bright.’”
It was the last time Mary would see John Fitzgerald Kennedy alive.
Just after 1:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on November 22, 1963, dazed reporters rushed into the Star. A weeping Mary was among them. JFK had been assassinated in Dallas.
At the center of the maelstrom was one of the Star’s editors, John Cassady. Cassady was well liked among the staff, and known for his unusually even temperament. Calm and deliberate, he was what one former colleague described as “an old style gentleman.” Cassady was particularly influential on Mary, always able to coax columns out of her as deadlines approached.
Mary was dispatched to Andrews Air Force Base to meet Air Force One as President Lyndon Johnson and Jackie Kennedy arrived from Dallas with JFK’s body. Several hundred people had gathered by the fence in the harsh artificial light of the landing strip. Bobby Kennedy waited restlessly, as did other members of the cabinet. Mary described the scene: “Secretary of Defense McNamara was by himself, looking off into the distance. McGeorge Bundy, the President’s foreign policy adviser, was carrying a dispatch case under his arm. Theodore Sorensen, the President’s young special counsel, looking white-faced and stricken, was unseeing and unhearing in the nightmarish light and noise.”
A U.S. Navy hearse waited for the late president’s body. “And a few minutes after six, United States Air Force One, all white and blue, landed amid a deafening roar,” Mary penned. “The back door was flung open. But this time there was no familiar graceful figure, fingering a button of his jacket, waiting to smile, wanting to wave. Instead the light fell on the gleam of a bronze casket.”
Kennedy’s aides, who had loved him like a brother, were all there: Dave Powers, Larry O’Brien, and Kenny O’Donnell, among others. “The men picked up their inexpressible burden and placed it on top of the platform, and it was lowered into the hearse. Then in the frame stood his wife, Jacqueline, in a rose-colored suit with black facings. By her side was his favorite brother, Robert, the Attorney General, who had somehow gotten onto the plane although he had never left Washington. He was holding Mrs. Kennedy by the hand. She was lifted from the platform and opened the door of the gray hearse and climbed in the back. Bobby followed her. Several minutes later, the new President walked slowly down the ramp with his wife. With tears on their faces, the leaderless men of the New Frontier went up to greet him.”
After leaving Andrews Air Force Base, Mary had a cup of coffee in Bethesda and then went to the White House. In the lobby, she found Bob Healy, a reporter for the Boston Globe, looking like a wounded animal. The two retreated to the historic Hay-Adams Hotel for several Scotches. It was tempting to drink more, but both had work to do. They headed back to their respective offices.
Mary was asked to write both a news story about the scene at Andrews and an editorial. Mary went to her desk in the back of the Star newsroom and perched before her typewriter. Her heart felt like it was breaking.
Burt Hoffman, the editor on the national desk, came by her desk. “Newby’s looking for you.”
“I know.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Hoffman.
“I’m going to write for the news side first,” Mary said, “and then I’ll do his editorial.”
Newby emerged from his office not long after. He started circling Mary’s desk, edging closer as he consulted his watch.
“I’m going to finish the news story,” Mary told Newby, “and then take care of you.”
Newby never forgot the scene. As he stood over her shoulder waiting for the copy, Mary typed away, tears streaming down her face.
The news story came quickly, and she churned out the editorial in about forty-five minutes.
There are no better examples of Mary’s work than what she produced in the days following Dallas. Consider this excerpt from her editorial: “He brought gaiety, glamour, and grace to the American political scene in a measure never known before. That lightsome tread, that debonair touch, that shock of chestnut hair, that beguiling grin, that shattering understatement—these are what we shall remember.”
“She wrote that column off the top of her head,” recalled her colleague Lance Gay. “She said that was one of her easier columns to write. She came in and wrote. It was something she believed.”
“That evening a group of us who lived on Macomb Street, out Connecticut Avenue, drifted over to Mary McGrory’s,” Patrick Moynihan recalled. Moynihan told the others, among them Mary, how he had been in the White House that afternoon, just down the hall from the Oval Office, when he heard the news. The staff was replacing the rug in the president’s office, and the furniture had been out in the hall, with JFK’s rocking chair sitting atop his desk, “as if new people were moving in.”
After a long, uncomfortable pause, Mary declared, “We’ll never laugh again.”
“Heavens, Mary,” Moynihan replied with a start. “We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we will never be young again.”
As Moynihan would say later, “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought we had a little more time.”
On Saturday, the day after the assassination, Mary attended the wake in the East Room of the White House. As she entered, Kenny O’Donnell approached her. Mary had observed in her column that morning that O’Donnell would have been willing to die for Jack Kennedy. Wrapping his arms around her, he said, “I will love you forever for what you wrote about me.”
Mary was dismissive. “Well, Kenny, everybody knows that’s true.” They went in.
A Catholic Mass was held as part of the ceremony, the first time a Mass had ever been conducted in the White House.
Like most newspapers, the Star printed extra copies for what it expected to be heavy public demand. The staff was shocked to see many of those extra copies come back unsold. People were home, glued to their televisions, and did not go out to buy the newspaper.
Mary was supposed to write a reminiscence of Kennedy for the next day’s paper. She brought a draft to the desk of editor Bill Hill, who had a prickly relationship with many reporters.
Hill read the draft and said that it should be in the first person.
Burt Hoffman, who was watching the scene, began to protest. He was worried that Mary was on the edge of a breakdown.
Mary waved off Hoffman. “Burt, it’s okay. He’s right.”
She went back to her desk and labored over the rewrite. She managed to produce a remembrance that was deeply personal without being self-aggrandizing. “When he came to the White House, suddenly everyone saw what the New Frontier was going to mean,” Mary wrote. “It meant a poet at the inauguration; it meant swooping around Washington, dropping in on delighted and flustered old friends; it meant going to the airport in zero weather without an overcoat; it meant a rocking chair and having the Hickory Hill seminar at the White House when Bobby and Ethel were out of town; it meant fun at presidential press conferences.”
On Sunday, November 24, Kennedy’s body lay in state under the Capitol Rotunda. Mary worked through the crowd of hundreds of thousands of people waiting outside in near-freezing temperatures to pay their respects.
Back at the Star, she turned her attention to Kennedy’s widow, Jackie. “From the moment she arrived back in Washington, erect and composed, wearing the blood-stained clothes of the infamous day in Dallas, she has imparted meaning and order to the chaos around her. She would not want anything to be lost to the world. She brought her two children to the Capitol yesterday. If she wanted them to see, however imperfectly, what their father meant, she also dramatized to the world and the evil people in it that a young father had been slain as well as a president.”
As Mary completed her column that evening, she again spoke with her editor, John Cassady. “I’ll go to the funeral,” Mary said in low tones.
“You’re not too tired?” Cassady inquired.
On Monday, November 25, a million people turned out in the streets of Washington to watch Kennedy’s final funeral procession as it traveled from the Capitol past the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and on to Kennedy’s final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery. During the ceremony at St. Matthew’s, Mary whispered, “Goodnight, sweet prince,” as Kennedy lay in his coffin.
After the funeral, Mary walked with William Walton, an old Kennedy family friend. The day was cold, and the two went to the Hay-Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette Square from the White House, for a glass of brandy. They reminisced, and for a moment, just a moment, in the overstuffed comfort of the cozy bar, it felt as though maybe Kennedy was not dead. They both knew better.
After some time, Mary stood up. “But Bill, now I have to go and write his funeral story.”
Walton understood. He added a parting comment: “Do one thing for him. No crap.”
“Okay,” Mary said, “I’ll do that. I’ll try to do that.”
Mary took a taxi back to the Star. John Cassady was on the desk. Mary settled in to write. It might have been the fatigue, the brandy, or the grief, but nothing came. “I had a total, complete block,” Mary would recall. It was not long before she was surrounded by small piles of crumpled paper with abandoned leads.
Mary wrote long, ponderous sentences that hung like “Victorian crepe.” Her prose felt leaden. The minutes turned to hours, and three hours stretched to four, and then five. All the emotion and exhaustion welled up within her, but her feelings were unwilling to escape to the page.
At around eleven, John Cassady approached gingerly.
“Are you sure you can do it, Mary?”
Mary sighed. “Yes, I know I can.”
Cassady retreated.
Mary stopped and took a deep breath. She thought back to Girls’ Latin School and diagramming sentence after sentence. She thought about Kennedy the man, and traveling with him on the campaign trail.
And at that moment, Mary came to a fundamental conviction: in the presence of great grief and emotion, write short sentences.
She started to slash the long, soggy phrases in half. The writing began to move. Mary’s column on Kennedy’s funeral remains one of her finest. Here it is in its entirety:
Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s funeral it can be said he would have liked it.
It had that decorum and dash that were in his special style. It was both splendid and spontaneous. It was full of children and princes, of gardeners and governors.
Everyone measured up to New Frontier standards.
A million people lined up every inch of his last journey. Enough heads of state filed into St. Matthew’s Cathedral to change the shape of the world.
The weather was superb, as crisp and clear as one of his own instructions.
His wife’s gallantry became a legend. His two children behaved like Kennedys. His 3-year-old son saluted his coffin. His 6-year-old daughter comforted her mother. Looking up and seeing tears, she reached over and gave her mother’s hand a consoling squeeze.
The procession from the White House would have delighted him. It was a marvelous eye-filling jumble of the mighty and obscure, all walking behind his wife and his two brothers.
There was no cadence or order, but the presence of Gen. de Gaulle alone in the ragged line of march was enough to give it grandeur. He stalked splendidly up Connecticut Avenue, more or less beside Queen Frederika of Greece and King Baudouin of Belgium.
The sounds of the day were smashingly appropriate. The tolling of the bells gave way to the skirling of the Black Watch Pipers whose lament blended with the organ music inside the cathedral.
At the graveside, there was the thunder of jets overhead, a 21-gun salute, taps, and finally the strains of the Navy hymn, “Eternal Father Strong to Save.”
He would have seen every politician he ever knew, two ex-Presidents, Truman and Eisenhower, and a foe or two. Gov. Wallace of Alabama had trouble finding a place to sit in the Cathedral.
His old friend, Cardinal Cushing of Boston, who married him, baptized his children and prayed over him in the icy air of his inaugural, said a Low Mass. At the final prayers, after the last blessing, he suddenly added, “Dear Jack.”
There was no eulogy. Instead, Bishop Philip M. Hannan mounted the pulpit and read passages from the President’s speeches and evoked him so vividly that tears splashed on the red carpets and the benches of the Cathedral. Nobody cried out, nobody broke down.
And the Bishop read a passage the President had often noted in the Scriptures: “There is a time to be born and a time to die.” He made no reference to the fact that no one had thought last Friday was a time for John Fitzgerald Kennedy to die—a martyr’s death—in Dallas. The President himself had spent no time in trying to express the inexpressible. Excess was alien to his nature.
The funeral cortege stretched for miles. An old campaigner would have loved the crowd. Children sat on the curbstones. Old ladies wrapped their furs around them.
The site of the grave, at the top of one slope, commands all of Washington. Prince Philip used his sword as a walking stick to navigate the incline.
His brother, Robert, his face a study in desolation, stood beside the President’s widow. The children of the fabulous family were all around.
Jacqueline Kennedy received the flag from his coffin, bent over and with a torch lit a flame that is to burn forever on his grave—against the day that anyone might forget that her husband had been a President and a martyr.
It was a day of such endless fitness, with so much pathos and panoply, so much grief nobly born that it may extinguish that unseemly hour in Dallas, where all that was alien to him—savagery, violence, irrationality—struck down the 35th President of the United States.
Under the weight of tragedy, Mary produced a remarkable series of pitch-perfect columns—moving but not maudlin, graceful and understated. Haynes Johnson called them “the best thing I have ever seen in American journalism.” Many of Mary’s fellow journalists described it as criminal that she did not win a Pulitzer Prize for her work in 1963.
Jackie Kennedy wrote to Mary that her column on the funeral “will always be the best of all. It makes him so alive that I can’t bear to read it too often.”
But Mary was not entirely a stargazer when it came to Kennedy. She acknowledged his personal shortcomings and the problems during his term. “He invaded Cuba—and never relented in his hostility to Fidel Castro. He was slow on civil rights. He sent 17,000 Americans to Vietnam. . . . Those who did not know him or live through his death may find it difficult to understand the continuing bereavement of those who did. What was lost on that black day in Dallas was the irreplaceable sense of ‘glad confident morning’ that John Kennedy brought to the whole world.”
On Thanksgiving Day, less than a week after the president’s murder, Mary was invited, along with about twenty other guests, to Hickory Hill to have brunch with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. The Kennedys struggled to put on a brave face as they served Bloody Marys to their guests. Mary entered, weeping, and threw her arms around Bobby. He did his best to brighten the mood, but the terrible strain was apparent on Bobby’s face.
Mary coaxed Bobby into attending the annual Christmas party for the St. Ann’s orphans. She let the children know that Bobby Kennedy would be coming and told them to be on their best behavior. She was particularly fond of one of the boys from St. Ann’s, Michael Doyle, describing him as “the kind of child who melts you.”
Author Peter Maas recalled the moment when Bobby entered the room: “All these little children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence.” Michael Doyle ran up to Bobby, stopped in front of him, and exclaimed, “Your brother’s dead. Your brother’s dead.”
The adults were stunned into silence, and Bobby winced as if he had been struck. Michael Doyle burst into tears.
Bobby stepped forward and scooped up the boy, holding him close.
“That’s all right,” Bobby whispered to Michael. “I have another brother.”